It is a form of received wisdom that if parties want to win an election, they need to occupy the middle ground. By comparing the ideological positioning of the manifestos of the Labour and Conservative parties through history to their corresponding electoral successes, Paul Whiteley questions this received wisdom.
The party manifestos are now all published. Each launch was accompanied by spin from both supporters and opponents of the parties involved. For example, when the Conservative manifesto was launched Rishi Sunak claimed: “We are the only party in this election with the big ideas to make our country a better place to live”. Labour countered with the jibe that the manifesto was “The most expensive panic attack in history”.
The Institute for Government, a leading think-tank, argues that manifestos are important even though the promises they make are generally not delivered.
But do manifestos really matter? The Institute for Government, a leading think-tank, argues that manifestos are important even though the promises they make are generally not delivered. Equally, while only a handful of voters read them, research shows that candidates and parties use them in their election campaigns.
Another way of finding out if they are important in elections is to look at the relationship between the ideological positions the parties adopt in their manifestos and their subsequent success (or lack of it) in winning votes. It is frequently argued that parties should occupy the “middle ground of politics” if they are to win elections.
A Financial Times opinion piece argued last year: “The path to a UK election victory still lies through the middle ground”.
Labour vs Conservative manifestos and electoral successes
This strategy provides a plausible account of Labour’ current success in the polls. Keir Starmer moved the party to the centre ground after the swing to the left under Jeremy Corbyn failed dramatically in the 2019 election. But is it true? We can test this idea using data from a long-standing research program called the manifesto project.
This uses a statistical technique known as content analysis to code the issue preferences of parties as set out in their election manifestos into a “left-right ideology scale”. It is a comparative project which looks at manifestos from many parties across most democratic states.
To illustrate how it works, if a party manifesto makes favourable mentions of free enterprise and capitalism and argues that free markets are the best way to run the economy this would be coded as a right-wing position. If on the other hand it calls for stronger regulations on private enterprise and for state action against cartels and monopolies it would be coded as a left-wing position. A complex algorithm translates hundreds of these types of statements into a numerical scale.
Sometimes moving to the middle ground works, but other times it does not. Elections are won or lost for reasons other than the ideological commitments made by the party in manifestos.
The chart below shows how Labour’s vote share in all 21 general elections since the Second World War compares with the party’s score on the left-right scale. The left hand vertical axis measures Labour’s vote share (the top line in the chart) and the right vertical axis measures the ideology score of the manifesto below. A low ideology score means that the manifesto was relatively left-wing, and a high score that it was relatively right-wing.
Labour Vote Percentage and Left-Right Ideology Scores 1945 to 2019
The chart shows clearly that Labour moved to the right prior to Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997, and after the 2010 defeat moved to the left. As we know since 2010 it has lost three elections in a row and so this is consistent with the idea that moving to the centre ground wins votes.
That said, there are some clear anomalies in the chart. In 1945 the party was very left-wing and yet won a landslide victory. The most left-wing manifesto of the post-war period was in the February 1974 election under Harold Wilson, not one of the elections under Jeremy Corbyn. Despite this Labour won the 1974 election by a small margin, and it almost won the 2017 general election, Corbyn’s first contest.
In fact, the correlation between vote shares and ideology over this seventy-year period is negligible (0.08). This means that the party’s ideological position is unrelated to its electoral performance. Sometimes moving to the middle ground works, but other times it does not. Elections are won or lost for reasons other than the ideological commitments made by the party in manifestos.
Conservative Vote Percentage and Left-Right Ideology Scores 1945 to 2019
The second chart shows the same relationship but this time for the Conservatives. The party was remarkably left-wing during the Macmillan era of the late 1950s and this was accompanied by large electoral victories in both 1955 and 1959. When it moved to the centre in the 1960s this all went wrong and it lost elections in 1964 and 1966. Subsequently the party moved strongly to the right after Mrs Thatcher became the leader in 1975, and it won three elections in a row.
The conclusion is that moving to the centre ground is not necessarily a winning strategy. The underlying reason for this is that the voters do not pay that much attention to party manifestos in the first place. The parties and the media pay a great deal of attention to them, but the voters don’t. They are motivated by performance and delivery rather than promises for the future.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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